BBC documentary Fostering and Me with Lorraine Pascale was an affecting and
honest insight into foster care, says Sarah Rainey

Watching one of Lorraine Pascale’s baking shows, one imagines that her life is perfect; a wholesome world of cookies and cupcakes, where her greatest worry is a sunken Victoria sponge. But last night’s one-off documentary, Fostering and Me with Lorraine Pascale(BBC Two) offered a glimpse of the celebrity chef’s difficult early years – giving a sobering insight into Britain’s care system.

Pascale was, we learned, born in east London, where her natural mother gave her up to the Salvation Army soon after birth. After spending 18 months in foster care, she was adopted by a couple in Oxfordshire named Audrey and Roger. They divorced, Audrey had a breakdown and began physically and emotionally abusing Pascale. She was fostered twice more, but each time her troubled adoptive mother fought to get her back.

The film followed Pascale’s attempts to trace her foster families and investigate how the care system has changed. She was given unique access to fostering records, resulting in some harrowing home truths that were difficult to watch. “A lorry was travelling in her direction and she looked at the wheels and thought if she pushed Lorraine under them it would solve all her problems,” she read from one interview with her adoptive mother.

Pascale dealt with the horrific stories about her childhood with admirable calm. But the most powerful scenes were her reunions with former foster parents and siblings, interspersed with photomontages of her as a gappy-toothed toddler. She confronted her adoptive father, too (her adoptive mother now has dementia), about her family’s break-up – showing just how much the subject continues to affect her.

Pascale addressed hard-hitting questions, including whether race is a factor in matching children with parents (it is, although the child’s emotional needs come first). Of Caribbean descent herself, she was fostered by a succession of white couples, and though she didn’t feel “settled” in her many foster homes, she said that race wasn’t an issue.

“They had a home, I wanted a home, so what was the problem?” The documentary culminated in Pascale tracking down the family who had fostered her for the first 18 months of her life, via a radio appeal. There wasn’t a dry eye in my house as she heard how her foster mother had given her up.

This was an affecting, honest documentary bolstered by some sobering statistics (there are 60,000 children in care, and 9,000 foster families needed within the next year to meet growing demand). But it was Pascale’s personal experience that brought home the truth of what it can be like to grow up within the care system.